It’s a clever use of the car’s existing sensors to improve ride quality.

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When the Lincoln Aviator goes on sale later this year, it will be one of the first-ever vehicles to have predictive adaptive suspension.

Lincoln

Citroen had a very early interest in adaptive suspension and developed a hydropneumatic system that won many plaudits.

JEAN-PIERRE MULLER/AFP/Getty Images

The first production car with electronic adaptive suspension was the Toyota Soarer in 1983.

Toyota

Lotus probably did more to popularize the idea than anyone else. The Lotus 99T was its first active-ride F1 car.

Paul-Henri Cahier/Getty Images

The Williams team built a better active suspension system than anyone else. By 1991 it was so good, and the FW14B car so unstoppable, that the FIA banned active suspension from 1993 onwards.

Paul-Henri Cahier/Getty Images

You can still find manually adjustable dampers if you know where to look. In this case, under the hood of the Volvo S60 T8 Polestar Engineered. You twist that knob to change how the damper reacts.

Jonathan Gitlin

When Lincoln's new three-row Aviator SUV goes on sale later this summer, its engineers hope it'll be one of the smoothest-riding vehicles in its class. The key to that is a clever new adaptive suspension system with a feature called Road Preview. As you may have just gathered from the name, it looks at the road ahead and uses that information along with the more normal sensor input to constantly adjust the stiffness of the dampers in anticipation of big bumps or potholes.

A vehicle's suspension is often required to please more than one master. On the one hand, its job is to keep the contact patch of each tire as close to optimum as possible to ensure good handling and road-holding. But it also has to soak up all the bumps and filter out all the jolts of the road in the name of ride comfort. For decades, that meant plenty of compromise when setting up springs, dampers, and the rest of the bits that attach the wheels to the car. Enthusiasts could buy adjustable dampers, although the adjustment usually meant parking up, popping the hood, and breaking out a wrench.

The idea of a suspension system that could react to different driving conditions while driving dates back at least as far as the hydropneumatic Citroens of the 1950s, but it was really the advent of electronic control that made the technology possible. Toyota started playing with the idea in the early 1980s with the Soarer, a domestic-market coupé. More will know it from its use in Formula 1, where it was introduced by Lotus' Colin Chapman, who was looking for a new unfair advantage. By 1992, the Williams F1 team refined the concept to such good effect that its FW14B was nigh unbeatable, causing the sport to ban the technology thereafter.

But in most cases the systems, which rely on inputs from wheel sensors and accelerometers many times a second, are still only really reactive. Wouldn't it be better if the car had advance notice?

This Lincoln system—which is similar to one that Audi is adding to its A8 flagship sedan in Europe—leverages the vehicle's forward-looking camera to get ahead of the game. It constantly reads the road up to 50 feet (15m) ahead and can spot deviations in the road surface ranging from 2 to 8 inches (50-200mm) above or below the expected road surface. That allows the car to prepare the appropriate damper (and air spring, if the car has that option fitted) for a big pothole or frost heave ahead of time, which in turn means it should be a smoother ride on the inside.

It's not the most earth-shattering technological development to come to the automobile, but it is a pretty neat way of leveraging an existing sensor to deliver a feature that engineers have dreamed about for decades.

I'd like to give this a try up here in the Canadian Prairies, where going over some of the potholes we have on our roads can make you feel like you're driving the General Lee trying to outrun Boss Hogg.

(And if the age of that reference doesn't disqualify me from a job at Google....)

“Adaptive suspension is not new, but using cameras to measure the road ahead is.“

I am pretty sure the latest Rolls Royce models do the same thing.

Yup

“So let's take a look at some of the details. Like the stereo cameras poking out of the windscreen, with a further camera mounted in the top center of the hulking front grille, and an infra-red camera tucked away in the right side of the grille, and the radar mounted almost at road level right at the front.

All these profligate sensors are actually necessary to drive Rolls-Royce's ambitious active suspension system, which reads the topography of the road ahead of you and pre-arms the self-leveling air suspension to deal with it as comfortably as possibly.”https://newatlas.com/rolls-royce-cullin ... res/55451/

States need to repair their roads, not depend on car companies with 5000lb SUVs to dampen the damage. (sorry, but rim damage is real...low profile tires are a design to minimize suspension and improve handling...and sell tire/rim insurance packages!)

The transmission does the old trick of reading GPS and topography maps for the roads ahead, so it can pre-select the right gear if you're headed toward a hill or a corner you might want to downshift for.

I'd be curious to know what technical limitations and design decisions went into the selection/specification of 2-8". I've certainly seen features smaller than 2" which are annoying (lane-to-lane height mismatches during freeway repaving). Is this system limited to operations within a certain speed range? This would also seem important and sort of likely.

States need to repair their roads, not depend on car companies with 5000lb SUVs to dampen the damage. (sorry, but rim damage is real...low profile tires are a design to minimize suspension and improve handling...and sell tire/rim insurance packages!)

Actually the extreme low profile tires you see today on 19" + rims are mostly about aesthetics. In some cases they might be needed to clear a very large brake system. However, they generally make handling worse due to the extra unsprung weight and the fact the extremely short sidewall has a harder time functioning as part of the suspension.

The predictive suspension comes with a benefit even when the car is standing still as it automatically raises the body by as much as 50 mm (2 in) when you use the door handle to enable an easier entrance.

The predictive suspension comes with a benefit even when the car is standing still as it automatically raises the body by as much as 50 mm (2 in) when you use the door handle to enable an easier entrance.

So, the cameras can notice the terrain around the car? So, if you parked near a downwards slope, would it lower the body? Or up you go?

The predictive suspension comes with a benefit even when the car is standing still as it automatically raises the body by as much as 50 mm (2 in) when you use the door handle to enable an easier entrance.

So, the cameras can notice the terrain around the car? So, if you parked near a downwards slope, would it lower the body? Or up you go?

And a similar question for the Rolls Royce version, which lowers the body to make entrance easier.

The suspension lowers itself an inch and a half when you open the doors, so it's easy to get in, then centers itself for driving, and rises up an inch and a half when you select off-road mode to give you pretty decent ground clearance

The predictive suspension comes with a benefit even when the car is standing still as it automatically raises the body by as much as 50 mm (2 in) when you use the door handle to enable an easier entrance.

So, the cameras can notice the terrain around the car? So, if you parked near a downwards slope, would it lower the body? Or up you go?

And a similar question for the Rolls Royce version, which lowers the body to make entrance easier.

The suspension lowers itself an inch and a half when you open the doors, so it's easy to get in, then centers itself for driving, and rises up an inch and a half when you select off-road mode to give you pretty decent ground clearance

Not sure how this Audi system works, but most of these systems simply lower the vehicle to allow easy access, based on a combination of various parameters.

All these profligate sensors are actually necessary to drive Rolls-Royce's ambitious active suspension system, which reads the topography of the road ahead of you and pre-arms the self-leveling air suspension to deal with it as comfortably as possibly.”https://newatlas.com/rolls-royce-cullin ... res/55451/

Thank You so very much for that link. Loz Blain's writing - all the way through the review - has given me the best laughs I've had in a while.

Example:

Quote:

For a personal touch, you can spec up the Cullinan to jive with your choice of lifestyle hobbies. Rolls-Royce provides "recreation modules" that can be fitted into the back compartment in a modular fashion. These include, and I'm not kidding, modules for drone racing, photography, fly fishing, picnicking, rock climbing, snowboarding, base-jumping and a sport called volcano boarding that I'm going to have to go and google. These modules plug in, some powered, some folding out, to make the back of the Cullinan work like an obsessively designed leisure rack for your toys and gear.

As with anything on this ultra-luxury tier, the closer you look, the fancier things get, in an ever-ascending spiral of fine details. You could spend a week sniffing, licking and rubbing your face against every surface in this car, and your level of appreciation still wouldn't line up with the amount of thought the designers have put in.

A bit off-topic, but I'm excited for the Ars review of the Aviator. I generally prefer sedans / performance oriented vehicles and hate the current SUV onslaught, but this is a very lust-worthy design for a SUV. If I had the budget...I'd definitely consider it. I can only imagine Lincoln selling loads of them.

The Infiniti Q45 from 1991 to 1995 had a form of active suspension; although it "read" the road by using doppler sensors under the front bumper which fed into a computer that controlled hydraulic valve actuators. It was known to be terribly complex and a maintenance nightmare though..

The predictive suspension comes with a benefit even when the car is standing still as it automatically raises the body by as much as 50 mm (2 in) when you use the door handle to enable an easier entrance.

My 2015 jeep grand Cherokee with air suspension has a park setting that lowers the car when in park. It raises itself once you start driving again.